It's All The Same Anyway
by Jessi Noan
Summary: AU West offers Jim a chance. This time, Jim submits. Read the warnings before reading the story, please.


**Title**: It's All The Same Anyway  
**Fandom**: 28 Days Later  
**Pairings**: Henry/Jim, implied Mitchell/Selena, Bedford/Selena and Bell/Selena  
**Warnings**: Non-Con issues, AU, Stockholm Syndrome, physical abuse, generally dark; Nothing is explicit but nothing is sugar coated either.  
**Genre**: General confusion and Angst abounds  
**Rating**: R or M  
**Feedback**: Appreciated but not necessary.  
**Notes**: I foolishly watched 28 Days Later yet again. Instead of writing a journal entry about how much Major Henry West wants Jim's pale English ass, I wrote a fic instead. I also would like to say it has been written between the am hours of 12 and 4. So really, I can't be blamed. I listened to Robbie Rivera's "Which Way You're Going" on repeat. It is now the most played song in my library ever. And, um, I really hate the end but it was definitely time to go to bed. That's it, I think.

All the mornings were the same. He'd wake up with the same hateful man kissing his face and neck and shoulders, murmuring his good mornings while calloused fingers poked and prodded places Jim would rather he never touched. He always wanted the same thing: A quickie before he left to rouse the day patrol and relieve the men on night duty for some much needed F&S (Fucking and Sleeping). He'd fuck Jim hard into the mattress, the headboard banging against the wall and plaster falling in chunks from the walls and ceiling -_ How is it there is any left?_ - all while West grunted and muttered incoherently above him. If he said anything that made sense, Jim never heard. He suffered his morning ritual of rape as best he could by not thinking at all.

On the mornings Jim wouldn't - couldn't - climax, West would quip at him for being in one of his "moods" again. - _Like I'm a fucking woman! -_ Jim had long since stopped caring what West thought his moods were. He did think it was pretty presumptuous of _that man_ to think he had these supposed moods just to annoy and frustrate the Major - _Pain in my Ass_.

It would take Jim thirty minutes after Henry dressed and left, tossing a tightlipped smile over his shoulder, before he could get up the resolve to crawl out of the soiled linen. He needed another hour of breathing deeply and tracing the pattern of the mildew-sodden carpet with his eyes and fingers before he could make his way to the dresser and his clothing. He never looked at himself in the oval mirror tacked to the wall above the cabinet. It obviously didn't matter if he looked as bad as he felt - _like warmed over shit on a hot, humid day_ - because Henry would fuck him no matter what.

Jim didn't leave the room much anymore. Days would come when he just couldn't force himself to move from his hunched-back squat next to the bed, alternating between dry heaves and shaking so hard, he had to grit his teeth to stop from biting his tongue off. West would find him after dark, his body taunt like a piano wire and his eyes watching for the one move that would make him snap. Henry learned not to coerce him on those nights. He ignored the shivering, naked man and went about his nightly routine, muttering about how dirty the room had gotten - _"How can anyone sleep in such filthy sheets?"._ Some time in the night, Jim would climb back into bed and curl up tightly against the Major and everything would be okay again. Well, for Henry anyway.

On the days Jim did leave the room, it was to take care of the basic necessities of eating, showering, defecating and laundry - _"Aw now, look at this boys! If it i'n't the Major's fuckin' toy 'imself! Doin' laundry like a fuckin' 'ouse wife!" -_ He never saw Selena or Hannah. (If he was lucky, he didn't see anybody.) He knew they were locked up elsewhere in the mansion, their treatment unthinkable but undoubtedly worse. Their cries for him - _"Help us! JIM! Please, God, Jim! We need you!"_ - ended the day after West made his claim on Jim's body. - _How long has it been?_ - He knew it was his fault they were in this situation. He knew that he was the guilty fucking party. They had depended on him to protect them from those fucking pricks and he practically gave those bastards the go ahead. - _"Jim, I want to give you a choice."_

He heard from West, on one of their more amicable days, that Selena had forced herself to miscarry Mitchell's - "_or was it Bedford? Maybe Bell's"_ - baby. Regardless of who the actual DNA donor was, Mitchell had been the one to beat her; She didn't walk for a week. Jim imagined that, if he saw her, she would walk with a limp. And it was all his fault.

"_We can't survive on our own. They can protect us." _

"_We've survived on our own before!" _

"_But not with Hannah. Not without Frank." _

"_Whose going to protect us from them, Jim? _

"_I will. I promise you." -_

Some nights, he thought he heard planes fly nearby. He always shrugged it off as wishful thinking. There was no one beyond the compound to fly the planes. As far as he knew, they were the last people alive on the whole British isle. - _Maybe the world...? - _Part of him realized he should be grateful he was alive, grateful that the Major had intervened on his behalf and only sent the "new age guru" off to the body pile. He should be calmly, if not pleasantly, resigned to being bedded by one, stupidly romantic man rather than the other eight, more aggressive soldiers. He knew, somewhere in the left over pieces of his mind, he was suppose to be happy to be alive.

"_Like you protected us just now? What about Hannah? She's only fifteen!" - _But he wasn't. Oh God, he wasn't.

What made him laugh, what was really fucking hilarious, was that in all this shit and dirt and waiting and fucking and hating and trying to hate this stupid man - _captor -_ as much as he hated everything else, he knew Major Henry West actually thought he loved Jim. On the days he bathed, - "_You smell like week old sex, Jim. How about you use the bathing facilities some time today? Just to see if you remember how."_ - he would find himself kneeling on the water-heated concrete and vaguely recognizing the slightly hysterical lit to his broken, choking laughter, overcome by the idea of his every day rapist and personal guard dog _loving him._

Like this was some kind of fucking fairy tale! As if he hadn't handed over the woman he loved and a newly orphaned teenager to a group of half deranged men with machine guns! As if he himself wasn't just waiting for the day, the opportunity, to shove West's gun right in his mouth and hold the trigger down until every bullet had helped make the hole in the back of that bastard's head that much larger.

On his bad days, Jim couldn't remember which one of them was suppose to be the bastard.

It nearly brought a man to tears.

_His nose burns and aches with such intensity, Jim is sure the rifle butt has broken it. If it weren't for the involuntary tears he has to rapidly blink away, he thinks he'd like to shove that rifle butt down the fucking prick's throat. He hears Farrell shouting in the background, trying to defend, he thinks, the three newcomers but his head bounced off the floor when he landed and nothing makes sense; Everything is second to the huge fucking pain in the middle of his face. _

"_I want to give you a chance, Jim." Their eyes lock. Jim wonders if it's the pain that's making everything dim and muddled as West's eyes seem darker and more serious in the poorly lit corridor than at any other time in his company. Jim won't know later what made him do it. Maybe it is the eagerness to help he thinks he can see behind the soldier's closed off face. Maybe there really is an open, 'I want to make the world better' yearning. Whatever it is, he closes his eyes and ends the stare down. "_We'll behave," _it says,_ "if you keep us safe."

Jim knew now that, if he saw anything, it was the naked need of a man trying to keep his family together. Selena and Hannah and he were all casualties to the greater need of the eight soldiers West had promised to save.

He never thought about how life would be different if he'd stood his ground; He only knew what it was like now. The soldiers - _guards_ - surveyed the borders of the compound in six hour shifts, all swaggering around as regularly sexed men in power did. The lawn in front of the mansion was still filled with mines but Jim didn't know if it was to keep the infected out or to keep them in. Occasionally, there was gunfire but the infected, if they were still alive (Mailer died a month ago), no longer come running from the woods, seeking blood.

Jim used to think about escaping, saving Selena and Hannah from their own, dirtier hells, but he's been confined so long, he's not sure he can. Besides, there's no point. It's all the same anyway.


End file.
